Steve Jobs and Apple, of course, represent everything that is still awesome about America.

Three decades ago, Apple was the project of a college dropout in a garage. Now it's an amazing global corporation that makes products beloved the world around, employs 75,000 people, and is, literally, changing the world.

America needs more success stories like Apple and Steve. But given how the world has changed in the past half-century, they won't be enough to restore the country's economy to its former greatness.

American innovators like Apple and Steve still design some of the world's most amazing products. And, yes, (some of) their employees and their shareholders get rich in the process.

But as the text on the back of the Economist writer's iPod observes—“Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in China—many of these products are actually made elsewhere.

And to those involved in the products' design and the ownership, this seems fine: Keep and own the most valuable part of the production process and let poor Chinese and others do the less-valuable manual work necessary to make them.

But as America as a whole has learned, there's a problem with this:

What you get when you take the process to its natural conclusion is an America composed of a handful of super-wealthy entrepreneurs and investors and hundreds of millions of others who can't afford to buy the products they make.

Yes, vast wealth and profit has been created in recent years by amazing American success stories like Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Some of the wealth these companies have created has also been shared by their employees. But, as the Economist notes, these companies together employ only 113,000 people. This is a third of the number that a single American company, GM, employed back in 1980.

Meanwhile, America's largest employer, Walmart, which employs more than 1% of working American adults, pays most of these folks about $8-$12 an hour. And those folks, of course, are lucky to have jobs: With the unemployment rate where it is, many Americans are no longer working at all (And some of them live in tent cities). Most of these folks, needless to say—Walmart associates and homeless, alike—cannot afford to buy the iPhones produced by America's most valuable and remarkable company.

In recent years, inequality in America has hit levels that have only been seen once in the history of the country—at the end of the 1920s, on the eve of the Great Depression. Some American entrepreneurs and investors are coining money, but this success is not being shared by the rest of the country, in which 46 million people use food stamps and unemployment is still over 9%.

You can't blame Apple for "offshoring," obviously: Apple is a global company, and we now live in a global economy. If iPhones and iPads had to be made in America, almost no one would be able to afford to buy them. And there's no easy fix here. But it's no surprise that so many Americans are frustrated.

In recent weeks, frustration about this state of affairs has turned into protests like Occupy Wall Street. And unless America takes steps to fix this problem, one imagines that these protests are only the beginning

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The death of steve jobs is not a symbol of America's decline. What a ridiculous and preposterous statement. The fact that apple products are made in china, rather than here, is. Take is a step further and place the blame on those at fault: socialist politicians who have been pushing for globalization and open borders for the past two decades or more. Some of them, now dead, should have been the recipients of your headline, like Ted Kennedy. Steve Jobs will remain a simple of american enterpreneurship forever.